This chapter explores the human causes of famine, and its consequences. It starts with definitions, an examination of the epidemiology of starvation, and the way it is measured (i.e., stunting, food insecurity, etc.). The next part delves into the evolutionary history of human starvation and the evidence for its current impacts on our biology. In the contemporary era two famines stand out, and the history and causes of each are described. The first is the Irish potato famine of 1845–1849, which had such a devastating impact that even now Ireland's population is less than it was before the famine struck. The second is the catastrophic Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, which was wholly 'man-made' and killed between 36 and 45 million people. The latter part of the chapter looks at the psychobiology of acute and chronic starvation, especially in children (the protein-energy malnourishment spectrum), and its remediation (and the ineffectiveness of diet alone). Finally, the relationship between overabundance of food in some countries and food insecurity in others is examined.

Chapter 8: Byzantion, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. In this chapter I introduce three of the city’s main public spaces, the Hippodrome, the Forum of Constantine, and the Baths of Zeuxippos, all of them decorated with classical Greek statues collected by Constantine in the fourth century AD. Many of them were bronze and had once adorned public places in Greece and Asia Minor; they served to preserve the classical tradition in the emperor’s new eastern capital, his Deutera Roma. The Bronze Athena brought from the Akropolis of Athens was destroyed in 1304 because her Classical gesture seemed to be summoning support from the Western world. The Serpent Column, imported from Delphi and still standing today, might be seen as a protector or as a threat. In AD 500 Christodoros raved about the Greek statues in the Baths of Zeuxippos, but they are all gone, and we can identify only a few classical types, even fewer of the Trojan heroes.

The end of the war followed by the final crisis of Unionism forced the minorities to undergo profound changes. They first lived through a time of mourning – for the famed ‘blood sacrifice’ of a generation in the war, but also for the passing of the Union. Then they experienced the need to adapt rapidly to the new political system which was emerging from a revolution which they had not supported. For the Jewish people, much more important than the 1916 Proclamation was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whose importance is discussed in the third section of this chapter. The latter also introduces Christian Zionism, a well-represented view among southern Protestants. Between the end of the First World War and the 1921 Treaty, Irish Protestants and Jews were similar not only in their relation to the new order, where their priority was safeguarding their continued existence as distinctive communities, but also in the way they behaved when they found themselves in a position of power – as Protestants did in Northern Ireland and Jews in the Zionist settlements in Palestine.

State intervention can spur development, but only when executed with competence and accountability. This chapter explores when, how, and why state action works. It surveys successful industrial policies and failed ones, identifying the institutional conditions that distinguish them. Rather than demonize or glorify the state, it argues for adaptive, evidence-based strategies that blend public purpose with market discipline.

Chapter 3 examines Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas and genius to address how works of genius can be judged. While Chapter 2 showed that judgments of perfection mediate between nonaesthetic properties and aesthetic evaluations, this applies only to works that are good examples of their kind. Works of genius resist this model because they transform or repudiate existing categories, so attempts to apply judgments of perfection are necessarily frustrated. These failures reveal the limits of existing concepts and the originality of the work, prompting a new approach. Current solutions either subsume such works under existing kinds, which undermines originality, or abstract from kinds entirely, which erases the contrast that makes originality intelligible. The chapter proposes two alternatives, concept expansion and concept repudiation, which preserve historical awareness while honoring innovation. Here, judgments of perfection play an indirect, heuristic role. Building on this insight, the chapter develops the notion of informed pure judgments of taste, which retain the concept-free character of aesthetic judgment while being enriched by historical and critical awareness.

In several previous chapters, we have been primarily concerned with providing upper bounds on the worst-case risk of specific procedures. Here, we seek instead lower bounds on the worst-case risk of any procedure. Such minimax lower bounds provide a benchmark against which we can measure the performance of proposed methods. The three main types of minimax lower bound we consider arise from Le Cam's two-point lemma, Assouad's lemma and Fano's lemma, and we will see several examples of how these results can be applied. Finally, we establish tools for controlling minimax quantiles, in an attempt to avoid the loss of information in reducing the (random) loss to its expectation (risk). In many cases, it is possible to characterise the dependence of minimax quantiles on the quantile level, thereby providing a finer-grained understanding of the difficulty of a statistical problem.

This chapter reflects on the social implications of the Natural Economic System, emphasising the crucial role of natural profits to ensure that capital accumulation keeps pace with the evolution of final demand. In its turn, the natural rate of interest aims to maintain a labour-based income distribution.

It discusses the historical challenges economists faced in understanding the implications of the Industrial Revolution and the shift towards subjective, individualistic, criticising it and advocating for a broader perspective that considers the interdependence of economic phenomena.

Focus is placed on the social function of capital. Unlike labour, which directly contributes to the production of goods, capital goods fulfil a societal role by enabling employment and supporting the broader infrastructure of production. Whereas consumption decisions have merely individual effects, investment decisions may have dramatic implications for society as a whole. As a consequence, the importance of institutional frameworks and the need for openness in exploring alternatives to market-centric approaches are highlighted.

The chapter explores the distinctive features of capital accumulation in industrial economies, and expresses concern over the excessive expansion of financial capital. It critiques the Modigliani-Miller Theorem and the financialisation of the economy, emphasising their reliance on unrealistic assumptions and potential negative consequences.

This chapter draws out the sacrificial implications of Aquinas’s account of love. By combining Aquinas’s theory with ideas from Philip Pettit about the robustness of love’s behavioral implications across possible worlds, the chapter presents a metaphysical framework for understanding why human love is essentially sacrificial. It is argued that the sacrificial dimension of human love is not contingent on the existence of sin and evil.

This chapter concerns strong hungers – hypophagias. Obesity forms the starting point. The claim is that it is linked to greater hunger (relative to non-obese people), manifesting as heightened responsivity to specific hunger and reduced capacity to experience general hunger and satiety. The evidence is inconsistent, which may reflect the heterogeneity of obesity. Genetic influences on hunger form two different literatures. One deals with polygenic effects, which are not well studied. The other concerns monogenetic causes, with over seventy documented, but few studied in detail except Prader–Willi syndrome – which appears to result from dysfunctional satiety. Hypophagia has also been claimed to occur in several neuropsychiatric conditions, and this is examined for bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, cravings and food addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, atypical major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. The multiple abnormalities surrounding hunger and eating in dementia (Alzheimer’s and fronto-temporal) are reviewed, alongside the impact of brain injury, tumours (craniopharyngioma), and endocrine disorders. Drugs that may augment hunger are also described.

Chapter 9 examines a negative case in Latin America, where far-right parties remain almost entirely politically and electorally irrelevant. Even after Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (MORENA) victory in 2018, no far-right party emerged in response to Mexico’s turn to the left. This study argues that López Obrador’s “leftism without progressivism” failed to generate the incentives necessary for a conservative backlash or the successful rise of a far-right party. His government did not champion progressive policies – particularly on sociocultural issues such as gender equality, LGBT rights, or racial equality – that typically fuel grievances among far-right voters in Latin America and Europe. On the contrary, López Obrador often expressed conservative positions on matters including public morality, drug legalization, climate change, and immigration. As a result, the first left-wing government since Mexico’s democratic transition did not trigger significant far-right mobilization. Paradoxically, it even partially satisfied voters who might otherwise have been drawn to a populist radical right party. This study also finds that a segment of the Mexican electorate, based on programmatic preferences, could be receptive to such a party. In future electoral cycles, this latent demand could create an opening for far-right actors seeking to mobilize support for their policy agenda.